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MY GUESTBOOK
Leo, the unflappable political giant, pales and trembles until CJ and Gina take his arms and lead him over to a chair, sitting him down and asking if he wants water or something to eat, doting upon him because it�s easier to focus on something and someone that they can fix rather than thinking about what they have no control over. Any other time you would tease CJ for acting like a mother hen�you don�t know Gina well enough to tease her, and the gun at her hip is making you nervous even though you know she�s one of the �good guys��but that is the last thing on your mind as you watch Leo allow himself to be taken care of by the two women.
If Josh is your brother, Leo is his father, at least as far as the family tree of the West Wing goes. You�ve never really understood, nor cared to understand, the relationship between Leo McGarry and Josh Lyman, only knowing that they knew each other before the campaign and that Leo brought Josh in from the moral ambiguity of the Hoynes campaign to work for the brutal honesty of the Bartlet campaign, something that you�re infinitely thankful for because not only did you get Josh, but with Josh came Sam and, despite how you treat him, you know you would be lost without your young, idealistic deputy, even with his problematic friendships, questionable punctuation, and bizarre aversion to verbs.
You know that by now the First Lady has been informed and is probably on her way to the hospital in an armoured limo, maybe on the phone with Ellie and Liz who she won�t want to find out about everything from CNN, but you think it�s more likely that Dr Bartlet is talking to the doctors at the hospital even though she is going to ask them the same questions as soon as she arrives. You check your watch and realize that she has probably already arrived and you can�t help but wonder where she is.
You know that the Vice President has been surrounded by Secret Service and taken somewhere, possibly the Situation Room, for a full briefing on what little is known thus far. Leo needs to get back to the White House, and CJ, too, because the press is going to be speculating until they�re given a statement, and even then they�re going to speculate but at least then they�ll have quotes to truncate and a statement to spin.
You don�t know when you found out that the President was shot. It must have come over the radio when you were in the ambulance, or maybe even when you were in the crowd�there were enough radios there for you to overhear something. You hear CJ ask Leo, hoping to distract him from the fact that she�s touching his arm with hands that are covered in the blood of his surrogate son.
There was so much blood, you think, though you took physics not biology because your mother nearly had a heart attack when Talia came home from school in tears because her biology teacher made her dissect a foetal pig and your mother was sick enough by the time you reached high school and you didn�t want to make her life any more difficult. You still want to know how physics was at all important to you, the way your guidance councillor always said it would be. Physics didn�t help you get into law school�you almost didn�t make it because physics in college brought your GPA down�and it certainly hasn�t come in handy while working for the President.